Birmingham, AL
How exposed is Birmingham to wildfire?
Birmingham's 90,255 buildings earn a 70th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Birmingham at the 73rd percentile, close to its 70th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 18.8% of Birmingham's 90,255 buildings carry Direct exposure and 24.5% carry Indirect; the remaining 56.8% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 90,255 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Birmingham ranks
Birmingham's 70th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 45th ranking inside Alabama does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 25 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Birmingham ranks 9,570 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 78 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 326 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Birmingham's 70th-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Hardening a home in Birmingham
With 56.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Birmingham gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Birmingham's 70th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Birmingham, see the exposure-zones guide.